Last Friday, Anthropic switched off its two most capable models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, for most customers. It did so not by choice but after being arm-twisted by a US government export-control directive, citing national security issues, that bars access by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the US, including Anthropic's own foreign-national employees.
Because Anthropic couldn't cleanly separate US citizens from non-citizens, compliance meant disabling the models altogether. So, a frontier AI tool that was launched days earlier went dark within hours of a letter from the US commerce department. This also disrupts the Anthropic-led expanded Project Glasswing - uniting major tech firms like Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Apple - to combat AI-driven cyber threats that India would have been benefited from.
If one strips away specifics, the episode is a signal flare. For a decade, technology denial has crept from the periphery of sanctions on adversaries (like Huawei) to the centre. 2025 AI Diffusion Rule sorted the world into tiers and, for the first time, treated model weights as controllable munitions. Friday's directive is the next turn of that screw.
The frontier of control is no longer geographic but the individual. What is alarming is the precedent it sets. If a security concern can vapourise a publicly launched model overnight, every other deployment now carries that contingent risk. That should unsettle every government betting its AI future on the US stack, India included.
India has wagered heavily on tech diplomacy with the US - TRUST (Transforming the Relationship Utilising Strategic Technology) initiative launched by Trump and Modi in February 2025, the Pax Silica supply-chain compact, and India-US AI Opportunity Partnership signed this February. The framing is seductive with India as 'trusted partner' anchoring AI infrastructure outside East Asia's chokepoints. The latest Fable 5 episode, however, exposes the fine print - conditional trust that's revocable overnight.
Link: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/opinion/et-commentary/tech-denials-come-home-the-anthropic-shock-is-indias-wake-up-call/articleshow/131727684.cms